No Country for Old People?

When she first joined HUD, Velma Simpson found herself relegated to short-term assignments because her supervisors assumed that anyone in their 50s working for the federal government inevitably had one foot out the door. Eventually, Simpson helped them realize that her new job was a destination, not a transition. Sally Bingham was a California homemaker in her mid-40s who wanted to become an Episcopal priest, but quickly discovered that you can't go to seminary unless you've been to college. She spent a decade and countless dollars to get through undergraduate school and seminary. Today, she runs the Regeneration Project, a San Francisco nonprofit that's leading a religious response to global warming.

When only the supremely determined or plain lucky are able to act on their aspiration for work that we need them to do, it's a loss for us all. Making the most of this opportunity will require a round of rethinking and reform commensurate with the demographic transformation unfolding before us. We need, first of all, a vision for longer working lives that's as appealing as the golden-years dream of shorter ones (and ever-longer retirements) was for earlier generations. That means going beyond such oxymoronic concepts as "retirement jobs" or "the working retired." We need an ideal that swaps the old notion of the freedom from work for a new freedom to work -- in new ways, on new terms, to new ends.

Today's circumstances call for a new social compact: In return for working longer in areas of high national priority and social need, boomers should get help making the transition. Policymakers need to get rid of vestiges of the old deal, the barriers and disincentives that discourage work and penalize individuals for continuing to contribute. This means changes in Social Security, pension rules, health coverage and other areas.

We can expand and adapt successful government initiatives such as the Troops to Teachers program, which helps retiring military personnel train for second careers in education, and private-sector initiatives such as IBM's Transition to Teaching program, which helps the company's senior engineering and technical staff move into new roles as public school science and math teachers. (IBM and the Partnership for Public Service this month announced that the program will also help IBM re tirees move into careers in the federal government.)

Enabling many more to retool for their next stage of contribution requires a new kind of higher education. Ten community colleges around the country are piloting low-cost, expedited programs to help aging boomers launch encore careers in education, health care and human services. GateWay Community College in Phoenix, for example, is joining forces with local employers to help boomers move into careers providing better services to the elderly in the area.

Just as the GI Bill helped millions of soldiers go from military life to civilian life 60 years ago, we now need an education-focused GI Bill: Boomers who pledge significant second careers in areas such as teaching and nursing should be supported in going back to school.

These changes in thinking and action are a tall order, but the result could turn today's common refrain, that graying means paying the bills racked up by an aging society, into a kind of payoff. In the process, we might just manage to help the boomers rewrite their legacy. Instead of being remembered as "the generation that never trusted anyone over 30," or worse, "the greediest generation," boomers can capitalize on longer working lives to go beyond their own narrow needs, get down to some of their most significant work and leave the world a better place than they found it.

mfreedman@civicventures.org

Marc Freedman, chief executive of Civic Ventures, a think tank focused on the aging society, is the author of "Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life."